what's happening to me goes i'm sorry martin this is breaking news that though yesterday obama gave a really impressive and wide ranging speech on an issue that if we have access to ninety nine percent of income inequality he said that the gap between rich and the rest of the country is the defining challenge of our time and that it drives everything he doesn't have this yes obama even went as far as deconstruct the very system he's a part of. ordinary folks can't write massive campaign checks or hire i price lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else's expense so people get the bad taste that the systems ranked. that increases cynicism and polarization

and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government. wow i couldn't agree with him more but if there's one thing we know about this president that he talks a big talk back and all that lofty rhetoric is a different story this is a wall street man who was put in office by goldman sachs obama has appointed big bank lawyers eric holder and lonnie brewer to top positions at the dozens apartment and wall street favorite son timmy geithner to the treasury under obama wealthy americans have only grown stronger and richer and more in bold and so you can't blame me for being just a little bit skeptical of a one percenters script but it's time to end the charade guys let's break the set. of the. people they are very

hard to take. to get along well you better had sex with that are right there. for the. good. guys there's a grave threat facing our nation and it can hit you anywhere at any time. could you imagine just walking down the street minding your own business when someone punches you in the face for no reason at all it's called the knockout game with me here rabbi gary masse. which he is

a former cop lives in brooklyn he is teaching fellow jews to defend themselves against these so-called knockout attacks has a black belt also in karate and is know not to follow cops is rambo it's also there's a racial component well let me say this there may be let me say this the victims appear to have been all white and the assailants appear to have been all black so yes it seems the corporate media can't seem to shake its fixation on the latest fake phenomenon because you see this is not new and there is no real data supporting this growing trend in fact over the last two years there's only been get this a point seven percent increase in unarmed random assaults but i do fox news is going to lot of pesky thing called facts stop them from a perfectly good opportunity to fearmonger us about brown people the point is that

all of this is being blown out of proportion and it's turned into one giant race baiting distraction so let's look at a couple of stories being knocked out by the knockout game for example have you ever heard of alec or the american legislative exchange council well if you've been watching breaking the set and probably the answer is yes but the corporate media barely makes a mention of this highly influential lobbying group which is holding a giant summit today and washington d.c. encountered with massive protests see this forty year old organization is comprised of conservative pro-business individuals with team up with corporate heavyweights from telecom to big oil and what do you know alec is responsible for some of the worst legislation on the books including the infamous stand your ground laws voter id requirements and the right to work an initiative which is really one massive attack on unions today back door meetings are happening with lawmakers from all across the country so they can go back to their respective districts and lay out alec's corporate agenda the model bills being attacked this week are the e.p.a.

is regulation of green. house gases and the opposition to food labeling among many others and yet another story overshadowed by the cayo nonsense is n.s.a. spying which by the way is getting worse by the day as the leaks continue to confirm the newest revelation is that the n.s.a. collects a staggering five billion international cell phone g.p.s. locations daily expanding its open air spying prison globally and also the editor of the guardian was recently called to testify before the british parliament why well after publishing n.s.a. leaks related to britain the u.k. government is trying to charge the publication under the terrorism act it's an unprecedented move which many see as the criminalization of journalism and as journalist glenn greenwald brilliantly tweeted if you want to make a list of the world's worst governments you can began with ones equating journalism with terrorism so while the real news is going on the focus is instead on mobs of black people randomly attacking white people maybe it's time to knock out the

corporate media instead. do you ever get the feeling the global economic models run entirely on greed but today's society functions soley on the principle of nonstop consumption and all screwed humanity is capable of much more of the system we live in is simply not sustainable what's the alternative to explore this question and more i spoke with activists of the de growth movement but for most an anti consumer's model to society his name is charles eisenstein and he's the author of a new book called the more beautiful world our hearts know what is possible i spoke to him earlier and i first asked him just how the ideals of the growth movement could be applied to our current political economy. i just don't understand d. growth you have to understand what growth is. growth is in economic terms it's the

growth in the amount of goods and services that are exchanged for money so on a systems level that would mean d. growth would mean less and less of nature being converted into products and less of human relationships being converted into services on the personal level it means. reclaiming some parts of life from money let's take a look at u.s. consumption habits in particular because it's pretty shocking when you look at the stats for number one or two in the world in meat consumption depending on what source you're looking at number one in energy and number one in food waste charles how do we even begin to tackle mass consumption facing these kind of statistics. well i mean most environmentalist's will tell you that that continued growth is impossible that that on a finite planet we can't continue to have infinite economic growth and something's got to break you could argue that the economic crisis of two thousand and eight

thousand and nine was at bottom a crisis in in growth. because our money system doesn't really work unless there is continually expanding demand which means expanding consumption expanding production expanding employment. more and more being consumed but you look around society and nobody really thinks that you know look at all of the depression all of the waste all of the alienation you know the ecological destruction what this world really needs it's more stuff right i mean nobody's actually thinking that but we're stuck in an economic system that demands that and to solve it would and will require. a transformation that goes much much deeper than anybody's really. really talking

about these days right i mean besides environment impact of mass consumption how do you think the idea of nonstop consumerism has affected global social habit. yeah i mean any any time that. we encounter what's called an undeveloped market basically what that means is zero here's some people who could be consuming more. who don't have a fully monetized life who maybe still haven't lost the skills of mutual care of of i don't know healing with herbs of cooking traditional food they have ways to to share labor they take care of each other's children kind of like i was here few generations ago. and then these societies get converted into consumer societies let's talk about economics because you're just talking about vulture capitalism is creeping into every nook and corner of the entire world turning people into consumers your book sacred economics you've said that scarcity is built

into the monetary system what do you mean by that and how does it apply to today's economy. so we kind of take scarcity for granted as a fact of life and we look around the world and it's hard to say that that there is abundance when one in five children is going hungry every night but you little bit more closely and you see that the reason that they're going hungry isn't because of a lack of food it's because fifty percent of all food in the west is worth close to fifty percent is wasted huge tracts of land are planted for biofuels feedlot meat production lawns the largest irrigated irrigated crop in america wants you know so we don't have a fundamental scarcity of food what makes it scarce is the way that it's distributed which is largely because of of the way money works so we have

a scarcity of money. the same thing with with the recent trend toward shrinking of public services the shrinking of funding for the arts for for education all these things like where is all the money going is that there's a built in physical lack of this substance called money no i mean money is a social agreement we could create as much of it as we wanted. but we're locked into a system and that system itself is locked into deeper more invisible narratives and ideologies and i would even say mythologies that that. perpetuate artificial scarcity so the scarcity is artificial and just to say at bottom where it comes from as far as money goes it comes from the fact that money is created as interest bearing debt i want to play you a sound bite from newton friedman who famously said this in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine the phil donahue show. of course none of us are greedy it's

only the other for the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise so that seems so there's friedman saying greed is good there is no turn it have to free market enterprise charles what's your response. well so economic logic says that the more goods and services are produced the happier we are the better off we are like after all if you didn't want something it wasn't good in your life you wouldn't pay for right you would work less and make less money instead of making the money and sacrificing the time to buy this good therefore the more things that are being bought according to economists the more good it is being at but really you know you look around at you. so you examine your life examine the lives of

people in affluent countries it's just not true that the more stuff we have the happier we are in fact for a lot of people discover that it's really the opposite that yeah we have more and more of the things that can be quantified but less and less of the things that actually make life rich i think a lot of greed greed is actually a symptom it's a symptom of the scarcity of the things that money can't buy so if you're. an alienated isolated separate self without community without intimate relationships with nature without being. embedded in this web of stories and and intimate relationships that once characterized society you know there you are in your suburban box disconnected from nature and community then you're going to feel hungry for something you're going to want to

reestablish your lost beingness and so you'll have. an unstoppable desire to consume to expand the separate self to compensate for the last being and i think when we're talking about growth as on the personal level a lot of people they want to recover these personal connections that can't be measured and that therefore economic growth and that whole ideology of greed will never satisfied. that was author and activist charles eisenstein for us in new york . coming up i'll speak with one activist who wants to democratize our local economies and most show you how. the continuing inconsistent rise of china beat the clearing district to fly zones or a critical view on the subject of buying u.s. dollar did in fact it would appear that china is tearing a page from washington's playbook to make rules to its geopolitical interests.

fact that it's. over. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy correct albus. role. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across several we've been hijacked why handful of transnational corporations will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once built up my job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem trying rational debate and a real discussion critical issues facing america to find a job ready to join the movement then walk away from the big picture.

please please please. please please. please. the the a. couple. with wealth inequality in america an all time high in congressional approval ratings an all time low it's no wonder why people are worried about the future of this country

today money not only means power it means political speech and the more well the. the consolidated at the top the less people feel they have the power to change the system by the wealthy and powerful interests working to get the people all the time there are still plenty of steps we can take right now right here to democratize our local economies here to break down what exactly those steps are md i'm a professor of political economy the university of maryland gar pair of it thank you so much for coming on alex i already are sorry you used to research foreign policy starting with world war two all the way to vietnam kind of analyzing the us empire crimes what inspired your switch to domestic economics well i think unless we change the system totally from the bottom up we're going to have international expansionism and pearl isn't. it time for seeing move back to the heart of the question that is the nature of the political economy and i think the last discussion of how we actually in the changing the system is the only answer to the

ultimate intra foreign policy questions too. and you coauthored an article with. ten ways to democratize your local economy it goes with your book what then must we do pretty much a playbook on how to do this. number one in the article is putting your money in local credit unions talk about this concept of what is a credit union and what it would do to democratize the community credit union and we have many people who are one hundred thirty million americans who would have democratized wealth that's a co-op one person one vote bank is a credit union they've got if you take them all together they have more money than the big new york banks any one of them wow and there they are you can move your money out of the bank and put it into a credit union which is a democratic bank and if you go a little further what some people in some parts of the country are doing too they are one person one vote you can get your friends together go to the board meeting and you can become the board of a one person one vote bank and begin investing in co-ops and other things that begin to show people a different direction towards the overall system stepping that starting at the

bottom and why is the call to fix these too big to fail too big to regulate banks not. nuff well the i think it what's going to happen with the banks if even if they break them up they will reconsolidate that's what happened standard or a t.n.t. so it was some level they're going to have to be turned into either public co-ops and i think people are going to get angry enough to do that or nationalize but that's the ultimate solution but building from the bottom up giving people an idea of what it means that's the we begin to build education by doing and then pointing towards larger and larger issues the book is not in the strategies not just at the bottom it's how do we build over time to move to the big ones as well absolutely let's talk about another initiative in the article which is taking back your local government through participatory budgeting to talk about this concept how would this work there's a very interesting it started out in brazil in porto alegre that is to say why does my can't the ordinary citizen be involved in the allocation of government money why not and so you can set that up in fact three cities new york does about ten million

dollars that way in chicago one of the aldermen to set up his district to do it that way vallejo california there they do very large scale citywide budgeting is beginning to be done that way changing the nature of the lobbyist to come in to the city council having ordinary people make those decisions as possible and again we're pointing from the bottom up and moving up nationally those are the kind of things we could build up to if we learn from the bottom up over time you know does case studies are really fascinating and one that you cited in the article how would we even began to do something like that in washington d.c. i mean what's the first step at a particular well washington first step would be to go to go through the council and begin petition get a referendum saying we want to do this with x. number of dollars or in some neighborhoods or parts of it just beginning making the demand it's being done other cities all over the world it's being done why can't we do it here good question gar and really how amazing would it be to control our taxes taxes are there ever been a dish or we could do something about that at least a locally recently boulder colorado just voted to. put there are like tricity under

public control this is an incredible feat to produce more renewables. could this be replicated around the country as well i think that is what's interesting about boulder boulder had two big fights they won one by just a fraction of the vote and then of course the corporations came in and then this is all done mainly by young people a lot of students involved in the next time around two to one vote and they want it and they're turning it from you know coal fire and oil fire over to renewables and it's a very serious operation there's discussion of pittsburgh and minneapolis many cities could do this and picking up on the boulder how do they exactly do it whether the referendum was a first step and then getting yet another referendum was forced and then the organizers they really did organize brilliantly so what you're saying is we have to get out and do something. about this is that and take action i mean it really is through these referendums and local actions that you can take i don't think people realize how much power they have what they don't the press doesn't cover this but this is going on all over the country and that's what the book what then must we do is about that's what the paper did with gene is about there's

a lot going on with co-ops worker owned companies public banks that the press doesn't cover but can be done right and you could if they can do it in boulder if you can do it in chicago you can do it where you are there's fights being won all across the nation all across the world against the corporatocracy ghar let's talk about our perception in the article in the book about nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals you're talking about how they can use their resources to fight things like unemployment poverty even global warming how how would that work what would incentivisation. yeah how they've been sent to a part of their being pushed this is a good one for students because that on one hand challenging them to stop investing in energy companies which are polluting and creating the climate change but the other part of it is hospitals and universities particularly by a lot of things in cleveland for instance there's a hospital university the hospital cleveland clinic in the case western reserve university right in the middle of a very poor neighborhood they buy three billion dollars in goods and services plus

their investment plus they're just what they buy so they are in that city there there's been an initiative to be. from work or own companies in a very poor part of the city to create worker ownership using procurement students can make that happen in many universities they can say stop investing the big guys start buying from worker co-op start building up toward neighborhoods that also is happening in the press covers very little of it but it is do it's doable it's being done and it's another precedent for democratizing ownership and building a different vision of where we're going we're full i think a decade ago someone saw the corporatization of private takeover of hospitals and universities they'd say that the path taken here we are with actual corporate name is taking over hospitals and would that be done through referendums as well through the school through any any any track that gets you there referendum is one but it is pressure and in some cases you find universities and hospital administrator is welcome the idea that they've just been locked into an old pattern say well why not you can do that here and that's what i think happened in some parts of cleveland

beautiful what other communities are practicing efforts like these that could serve as a blueprint for the rest of country again as i said to the press just doesn't cover pittsburgh has been developing this cincinnati is developing there are three in the washington area washington d.c. area is developing in amarillo texas number of cities one hundred cities have already made inquiries to do the cleveland what's called the cleveland model of worker co-ops supported by the purchasing of hospitals and universities so it's beginning to spread all over the country now and i think you're going to see more of it again young people could really make it happen at universities if they begin putting the pressure on and telling them you know this is being done lots of places why don't we get on the battling and start doing it or i think i think the first step is that you know people are just so overwhelmed where do they even go how do they meet up with people to start these referendum and start these movements of pressure what's your recommendation first thing resources tools we have about a minute left ok well the book what then must we do is filled with these kinds of examples that's why we wrote the website what then can i do that's this ten list of

things that can and i put together another website it's called double either but the. community dash well put the dash in dot org and you'll find thousands of examples of this kind of thing that you can do and build up and again the notion is not just local but how do we begin getting ideas that could be applied you know before the new deal the national things were done in the state and local laboratories and then they became national ideas that's the concept here not just look we're going to national with build up over time beautiful this is exactly what we need we need to start local grassroots bottom up to take this country back one community at a time gar all perverts thank you so much everyone check out what that must we do and what i do thank you so much for coming out for having me.

today workers across the country took to the streets in an unprecedented sign of solidarity against the fast food industries pathetically low wages thousands of fast food employees walked off the job to demand a fifteen dollars an hour wage and the right to unionize about punishment what started as a small we're going to movement in just a few select cities has caught on like wildfire now spread over one hundred cities across the nation considering the massive profits profits rather these corporate giants are raking in it's no wonder why workers are fed up with trying to get by on an livable wage the two biggest craptacular restaurants mcdonald's and young brands collectively bring in a seven billion dollar your income despite a growing profit margin the employees just aren't feeling the trickle down and it's not just fast forward workers themselves that are suffering it's every american and let me tell you why because no one can realistically survive on seven twenty five an hour u.s. taxpayers have been forced to make up the difference in public assistance programs

such as food stamps and medicaid in fact according to national employment law project mcdonald's alone cost taxpayers one point. two billion dollars just last year which is quite ironic considering how these are the same corporations fighting against the nanny state yet they're the biggest welfare queens of all so big props to these workers who refuse to maintain the status quo and are putting their jobs on the line to challenge these crony institutions. in closing tonight i want to pay my respects to former south african president nelson mandela who died just a few hours ago at the age of ninety five this inspiring leader an anti-apartheid revolutionary not only changed his country but the entire world with his message of peace and racial unification i'll bring you more mandela's life and legacy tomorrow but for now i'll leave you with his words no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion people must

learn to hate and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love for love comes more naturally to the human heart and its opposite. quite often countries rich in natural resources are the poorest africa's a colony it's a colony of the big corporations it's a colony of someone's home leaders who are under the thumbs of the big corporations so they have to beg from the world bank's development of social programs goes to pay back debts country is drowning under the amount of debt that they did and so

every year they would borrow money. and they would use that same amount of money to pay back oh this can all that money really help. the wages of debts. the. war is probably the most complex human activity. on. the phenomenon of friendly fire probably extends back to the invention of gunpowder. a bunch of people you know on. their resumes there are of us people. writing. this sort of

shoots my brother in the leg not intentional because of it because it was night times four in the morning even the best given the mesh shoulder. are going to make mistakes this is this whole idea of brotherhood and author and camaraderie in this sense it was in this context that has absolutely no place. i.

know. you're a pain and u.s. diplomats stand side by side with ukraine's opposition while russia's foreign minister pulls the reaction to the private test hysteria. to guantanamo prisoners to algeria against their will fear persecution imprisonment often being refused permission to reignite with death families that live in different countries. is full of flats in the u.k. despite deep concerns about addiction to betting machines in high street. and i was just crying and. that's when i lost the war cry.